We must lose our fear of being wrong.

Friday Arts Day with Lisa Hunt-Wotton

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

by Joseph Chilton Pearce

This is one of my favourite quotes and I have tried to live by it.

Artists live with fear. They live on the edge of imagination, of unreality. They reach into their minds and bring forth what is unreal and make it real. It’s scary, you don’t know if it will work, if it will be accepted. Artist also live with raw souls so the fear of being rejected is horrific. It’s what often shuts us down and causes the infamous ‘creative block’. I thought today we would take a chapter out of a beautiful book – “The Artisian Soul” by Erwin Raphael McManus.

Photo by Atilla Shia

‘Fear is the shadow of creativity. When we choose to create, we bring light to our fears. The darkness does not prevail over us. The creative act is inherently an act of courage. We are born with far too many fears and far too great a darkness. It is only when we find the courage to create that we are freed from those fears and that darkness. The past will be our future until we have the courage to create a new one. To make our lives a creative act is to marry ourselves to risk and failure (P7).

True creativity does not come easily; creativity is born of risk and refined from failure. If we are at the core both spiritual beings and creative beings, then the artisan soul is where we live when we have the courage to be our truest selves.

This is the courage of the artisan, to know our selves and be true to that knowledge. The artisan rejects all that makes us false and takes the huge risk of being true. To embrace our authentic selves and live in that raw expression of being fully human is our greatest risk and our riches reward.

We fear because we are uncertain that we are enough.

We fear because we are certain that we are not enough.

We fear because the creative act calls us to be more than we can be alone.

We fear because we were never intended to create apart from God.

We are like children with nuclear fusion in our hands – never fully grasping our potential for good and for destuction. It’s easier to control people if we convince them that they are inherently uncreative – everyone simply conforms and cooperates. If we want to create a better world, we had better start to unleash the creative potential inside each person to create all that is good and beautiful and true (p8).

I love the reminder that ‘perfect love drives out fear” (1 John 4:18).

There is an order to the creative process: we dream, we risk, we create. We cannot create with out risk.

There is no riskier way of life than the artisan way. Anything less is just existing….. To create is to be human.

To create is to fulfil our divine intention (p9).

To create is to reflect the image of God.

To create is an act of worship.

So, who is an artist? Anyone who has a soul. What are the qualifications for being an artist? You guessed it – having a soul. And though we celebrate the way the artisan soul is expressed in those who bring artistry and beauty to the world, this book is not about how to turn yourself into a painter or a dancer or an actor or a writer. Instead, this book is about a process through which you will discover and unleash your personal creativity. For us to journey together we have to come together with the basic assumption that each human being is uniquely designed to be part of the creative act. To move forward together, we have to realise that life itself is a work of art’ (p10).